Another ebay "your opinions wanted" thread.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m selling a used hard drive on eBay; most of my other listings are BINs, but this one is just a plain vanilla auction, starting price £1.00.

I got an email:

The user has one negative feedback(NPB) and one positive. His user name strongly suggests he is in the computer trade.

OK, so that’s all I have to go on, but my gut feelings (based on a little similar experience) are:
He wants to buy it cheap to resell.
I’m not sure that I can add a BIN without cancelling and relisting, but even if I did, he might not buy it anyway and I might end up selling it for less than at auction.
If he did buy it, I suspect he’d ask for it to be sent out before the cheque clears or some such.

Maybe I’m being unreasonable. At the moment, I don’t intend to even reply, I may even block him as a bidder - what would you be thinking and what would you do?

BTW, if anyone wants to add their own questions and turn this thread into a general ‘eBay: what should I do?’, that’s fine by me (Mod willing)

2

Trust your gut feelings. I don’t know if I would block him as a bidder - before you do that, you might check with the person who gave him negative feedback - but I wouldn’t attempt to change the auction for him, either.

3

If you have no bids I believe you can add a buy it now, but if he needs one fast wouldn’t it be faster for him to go to a local store?

4

Yeah, doesn’t sound good. Leave it alone.

5

Yeah, or buy one of the dozens of hard drives that are listed as ‘Buy It Now’.

Blocking a bidder probably is a bit drastic in this case; I had one (pre-bid) email conversation that went like this:
Him: The postage is £1.20 - why?
Me: The postage is based on the weight of the item, plus the materials/consumables required to pack it, plus a very small margin to cover my time, effort and other related expenses.
Him: Well, I think it’s too much, what posting method do you use?
Me: Ordinary post; please let me assure you that postage is a non-profit item for me on eBay.
Him: When you say ‘ordinary post’, do you mean first or second class?
Me: Most items are sent out by second class post, if the weight allows it. The postage alone on this item will be about 80p.
Him: I still think you’re charging is too much

…and so on; I blocked him (I don’t know if he tried to bid as I don’t know how the system works for blocked buyers) - I simply don’t want to deal with someone like that.